Auroratide

Coding + Storytelling

Bloody Mess

Game

  • A thin red cylinder with cartoony eyes on the floor, staring at an other red cylinder.
    Collect puddles of blood to stay alive.
  • A thin red cylinder with cartoony eyes fleeing from an angry mop.
    Pesky mops try to clean you away!

It's honestly a bit of an embarrassment, but this little game was in fact my first experience in using the 3D aspect of Unity3D. Considering neither me nor my friend Brendan Phillips really knew what we were doing, this bloody mess did not come out so bad. The game was made or the University of Advancing Technology's summer game jam, and we made the whole thing in about 12 hours.

In Bloody Mess, you control a blood puddle scurrying about a medical facility. Blood for some reason is dropping from the ceiling all over the place, so brooms were commissioned to clean up the mess. Unfortunately, this means cleaning up you as well! Your goal is to avoid the brooms and collect as many other blood puddles as possible.

In a Game Jam, your team is given only 48 hours to construct an entire game from scratch for a specified theme. The theme this time, much to our chagrin, was "Bloody Mess", and neither Brendan nor I were into blood and gore games. Therefore, we opted to make blood cute, giving it characteristic cartoony eyes and a hilarious premise.

I did not actually attend the university where the Jam was being held, so my friend and I worked over the Internet, streaming the development process on a Twitch channel called Wight Light Projects. Working remotely was challenging, and due to both timezone and scheduling differences, we did not get to use as much of the 48 hours as we wanted.

Our game features movement and collision, area-specific random generation of blood spots, interesting level design, and three different rudimentary AIs that I had only thirty minutes to construct. The game design was also rather well thought out; although the goal is to collect blood, doing so makes your puddle larger and therefore slower and incapable of moving between some of the furniture.

By the way, due to our time constraints, there are a few things about the game you should know, in case you decide to try it...

  • There's no way to quit. To stop the game you have to use Alt+F4.
  • The game crashes when you lose.
  • The numerical score in the corner doesn't really mean anything.
  • It is very easy to fall through the floor if you run into furniture.